Poetry

Terza rima

I ran across Robert Peake‘s “The Silence Teacher” tonight, and was struck by how he made the terza rima work so well (as well as, of course, the rather heartbreaking subject matter). I’ve always felt terza rima sort of propels the reader forward by keeping the rhyme scheme going so you’re always in the middle of it (villanelles, too, though they feel more appropriate for subjects which spiral around a central idea, or move forward in iterations).

And while writing this post, I remembered quite a funny poem written in terza rima which I read some time ago, and, happily, Ploughshares will let you search their archives by keyword, so I could find it to share:

Let’s say God got in over his head,
Which really shouldn’t be much of a surprise

Since he couldn’t even be sure a thing was good,
Until he’d gone ahead with its creation.
You’ll remember He called us very good,

Which suggests His judgment is a bit in question

– Terza Rima for a Sudden Change in Seasons by Jacqueline Osherow

Introduction – Mary Alexandra Agner

I’m overdue on my fortnightly post. I’m recovering from another bout with my parents telling me my poems don’t make sense to them. I’m learning how to deal with the fact that I keep quitting.

My worries are subjective. They eat into the facts as though they were chocolate chips cookies, Friday afternoon, latch-key kid home and warm. Between the holes: I poet, I dance, I cajole prose from busy and reluctant scientists and engineers for money. (I tend to iambs, once I’ve started.)

I’m here to find out why I love so little poetry. I couldn’t live without writing it but lack appreciation for others’ work.

I recommend most of Nancy Willard‘s work, and Emily Dickinson’s, and Constance Merritt‘s, and Elizabeth Hadaway‘s.

I leave you with lines by Abbie Huston Evans:

—Here, take them, Emily, they hurt

In telling; can you bear

To hear of elderberries, skirt

The coasts of sun and air?

Know all that hurt you once hurts still.

Need any tell you how

Night brings the moon, dawn finds the hill?

Want you such hurting now?

Modal Difficulty and Political Speech

The Slate article “The Poetry of Sarah Palin” put me in mind of Donald Rumsfeld’s poetry (compiled by the same Slate writer):

A Confession

Once in a while,
I’m standing here, doing something.
And I think,
“What in the world am I doing here?”
It’s a big surprise.

and Jean Chrétien’s:

A Proof is a Proof

What kind of a proof?
It’s a proof.
A proof is a proof.
And when you have a good proof,
it’s because it’s proven.

(which is a bit unfair as a criticism, since English isn’t his first language). It was online awhile back formatted as a poem, from memory as above (the quote isn’t from memory – it’s all over the damn place). I wish I could find the original link.

I’m not so much interested in the politics of these satirical pieces (which made me laugh despite how humourless I’m about to sound), but about what they say about the public conception of poetry. The underlying assumptions seem to be (a) that anything broken up into lines is poetry and (b) that poets talk funny, and that’s pretty much all there is to it. What the satirists are really saying is that these politicians talk a non-standard version of English from which they (the satirists) suffer a modal difficulty – and if they (the politicians) aren’t speaking in prose, well, what’s left? It must be poetry. There’s no third thing, right?

There’s a possible third thing: nonsense. (Ask me to define the difference between poetry and nonsense and I’ll have to refer to that old saw: I know it when I see it. I doubt I could come up with a definition which includes Wallace Stevens and Wesley Willis but excludes the above. I can only hope you all know what I’m talking about.) But these politicians aren’t speaking nonsense – what they’re saying makes sense if you can just ignore their bizarre sentence structure – so if it isn’t (quite) prose and it isn’t (quite) poetry and it isn’t (quite) nonsense, what is it?

Room Mag does Spec Lit

The creative writing program where I did my MFA, and for which I now work, won’t go near so-called genre writing, including speculative literature.  Actually, I’m not sure if that’s as strictly the case now as it used to be; nevertheless, I didn’t encounter a single example of spec lit or other types of genre writing in my two years there.  This has always bugged me.  I grew up reading fantasy and sci-fi and I’ll argue ’til I’m blue in the face that there are plenty of examples of speculative literature that are every bit as literary, intelligent, innnovative and beautiful as the best examples of “literary” writing.  There are also many authors who’ll write speculative work but won’t call it that.  It’s a complicated discussion and I could go on and on about it, but the purpose of this post is to point out that top-notch Canadian literary journal Room (formerly Room of One’s Own) is dedicating an entire issue  (Spring 2009) to speculative literature.  This makes me very happy indeed, and I hope it’ll encourage the wider writing community to accord more respect to quality speculative writing.  I know some of you Vary the Line contributors write speculative poetry, so I’d encourage you to check this out.  The deadline for submissions is January 19, 2009.  Room is a woman-run journal and it only publishes work by women.

What is experimental poetry?

My friend Ray Hsu gave a reading at my alma mater yesterday, and he summarized a conversation with his friend Tim Yu about experimental poetry.  Yu mentioned how everyone seems to call themselves an experimental poet these days, and Ray responded by saying that maybe that means that nowadays, truly experimental poems will be ones that don’t look experimental.  Tim Yu said, “Or maybe they won’t look like poems.”

I thought that was a totally fascinating idea.  Ray went on to talk about a poem he wrote and then folded up into an origami man (ETA: Ray just told me this piece is called “The Coroner”).  To read the poem, you had to unfold the origami, and the way that you unfolded it determined how you read the poem.  This led into a brief discussion of the limitations of publishing–what publishers will and won’t publish, where the line is, how an editor determines a book’s coherency and what they’ll keep and cut from a manuscript to obtain that, and so on.  Ray said he likes to test the boundaries and will send his editor things like scraps of poetry written on a map.  Sometimes the editor goes for it, sometimes not (he didn’t go for the map–too bad!). Obviously, you can’t publish an origami man–at least not in the same way you publish a book.  I wonder what other options there would be for distributing that kind of experimental writing?  You could hand it out at readings, maybe, or sell it at a bookstore.  I told Ray he should conscript his undergrads into an origami poetry assembly line for extra credit.

On the way back from the reading, my husband and I talked a bit about whether the publishing industry censors/controls the literary scene more or less than it used to, and whether newer phenomena like zines and the Internet contribute to that control and/or the diffusion of control, especially when it comes to experimental writing.

Just a few disjointed thoughts on publishing, production, and experimental poetry.  What do you think?  Do too many writers call themselves experimental?  Has the term lost all meaning?  What would, or could, an experimental poem that doesn’t look like a poem actually look like?  Where does experimental writing best find its home?

Determine who will serve and who will eat

In honour of the upcoming elections in both of my countries (and in honour of Hayden Carruth’s passing), excerpts from some of my favourite political poems:

but death went on and on
never looking aside

– “On Being Asked To Write A Poem Against The War In Vietnam,” Hayden Carruth

The princess in her world-old tower pined
A prisoner, brazen-caged, without a gleam
Of sunlight, or a windowful of wind;

– “The Anti-Suffragist,” Eva Gore-Booth

This place is not my place,
      these ways are not my ways. I
                 do not understand their
consumer index; their life-style options; their bottom line —
                            weird abstract superstitions, and
        when I settled in to stay,
              it felt unclean

– “Blue Psalm,” Dennis Lee

Meanin home
against the beer the shotguns and the
point of view of whitemen don’
never see Black anybodies without
some violent itch start up.

– “1977: Poem for Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer,” June Jordan

You squareheaded sons of bitches,
you want this God damn trench
you’re going to have to take it away

– “Ypres 1915,” Alden Nowlan

It’s coming from the sorrow in the street,
the holy places where the races meet;
from the homicidal bitchin’
that goes down in every kitchen
to determine who will serve and who will eat.
From the wells of disappointment
where the women kneel to pray
for the grace of God in the desert here
and the desert far away:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

– “Democracy,” Leonard Cohen

The deadline to register to vote in the U.S. is the end of this week or the beginning of next week in most states.

I’ve been told Canadians can register to vote at the polls, but I suspect Elections Canada would really rather you did it ahead of time.